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Sunday’s 20-17 loss to the heretofore horrendous St. Louis Rams marked the fourth time in four tries that the Chargers have lost a road game to a team that lost at least 11 games last season. Maybe it’s too soon to be losing our heads, but the last time “cake” came back with so much bite, Marie Antoinette was being hauled off to the guillotine.

Kansas City, Seattle, Oakland and St. Louis were a composite 15-49 in 2009. More recently, the Rams last week sustained a 44-6 shellacking from the chronically dreadful Detroit Lions. Going 0-for-4 against these guys is like having sand kicked in your face by Justin Bieber.

It’s humiliating. It’s disturbing. And with the estimable New England Patriots next on the Chargers’ dance card, there’s no reason to expect that the embarrassment has ended.

“The season is still a baby,” Chargers linebacker Kevin Burnett said Sunday. “We are just now getting over the first quarter of the season and entering the second quarter of the season. There’s a lot of football to be played.”

In point of fact, the second quarter of the season is already half-over. If the Chargers’ season is a baby, that baby has been severely spanked.

“We’re a 2-4 football team and I don’t know that it has anything to do with the road, or anything along those lines,” head coach Norv Turner said, in summary “… We have a lot of work to do to become the type of football team we want to be.”

Until Sunday, Turner’s work order was fairly narrow in focus. To that point, most of the Chargers’ problems had been confined to crummy special teams. Though their turnover differential has been troubling, the Bolts ranked No. 1 in offense and No. 2 in defense among the NFL’s 32 teams last week.

If those statistics were temporarily skewed by the comparatively low caliber of the Chargers’ competition, a market correction now appears imminent. What had looked like an isolated issue with the kicking teams broke out of quarantine Sunday and spread throughout the depth chart.

Quarterback Philip Rivers, the player most capable of carrying this team beyond mediocrity, was sacked a career-high seven times while operating behind an offensive line supposedly bolstered by the return of blindside tackle Marcus McNeill.

Rivers spent so much time on his back in the first quarter that he might have been testing mattresses, and the Rams were able to build a 17-0 lead before the Chargers slowed the leakage on their line.

But even as Rivers’ blocking got better, his receivers got fewer. Tight end Antonio Gates left the game with a sprained ankle. Wideout Malcom Floyd took his leave with a tender hamstring. This essentially reduced Rivers’ downfield targets to the productive Patrick Crayton (six catches, 117 yards) and the perplexing Buster Davis (three catches, one touchdown, multiple drops).